An Anecdotal Case For Misanthropy

So yesterday Matthew and I walk into a Starbucks in Baton Rouge. I have to update this blog, because we haven’t had wifi at the new house since we moved. Matt has to do an online algebra class. The coffee shop is almost full. Matt grabs the one free leather chair and starts his class. I go order us some drinks, then come back and take the last seat at the long communal table. My back is to Matthew.

A woman sitting across from me packs her things and leaves. The scraggly, skinny, pimply faced college boy — who had been sitting next to her looks at me with googly eyes and says, “She can sit next to me if she wants.”

“Excuse me?” I say.

“I said she can sit here next to me.”

“Who?”

“Her.” He points to my six-foot-tall, 14 year old son sitting behind me.

“Listen,” I said firmly. “It’s really okay.” And I shot him a look that said, this conversation is over. I have work to do.

He has his iPad in front of him, puts in his earbuds, and starts to watch a movie. After a couple of minutes, he starts making phone calls with the thing. Have you ever sat in a coffee shop next to people who carry on lengthy mobile phone conversations? It’s unnerving. They could be sitting there talking just as loudly to someone across the table from them, and you would barely notice. But the absence of an audible response is crazy-making. Your mind keeps wanting to fill it in.

After the third phone call this jerk made, I looked around, saw an empty chair across the coffee shop, and moved.

But once I’d heard his voice, he became impossible to ignore. On and on he went with these phone calls. An elderly gentleman sitting in a leather chair next to the long table caught his attention and said, “You need to take that conversation outside.” Scraggletop just looked at him and kept on. Completely meaningless conversations this guy was having. He was just calling people up to talk.

I must have lasted about nine minutes after that. Finally, I snapped. I stalked across the coffee shop, put my finger in his face, and went off on him. “You need to stop this, and you need to stop this right now!” I barked. “You are behaving with no consideration for the people around you. If you want to talk to somebody on the phone, go outside. Do you understand me? Have I made myself clear?!”

Man, I was mad. Scraggletop nodded weakly, and I went back to my seat. That was the end of his phone conversations inside the coffee shop. When I sat down, I noticed the old man look at him and say, “I told you it was annoying.”

I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like that, but you know, communitarianism has its limits. Maybe I’m a bad guy, I dunno. Maybe I was in touch with my inner Uncle Chuckie. Or maybe I was inspired by this French national hero:

IMO this was the wrong approach and you are lucky the situation didn’t escalate with your confrontational, aggressive behavior. Even uncover cops with the experience and authority to back up what they request would have been polite and calmly requested he not disturb others and would have made face-saving suggestions. You don’t know who you are confronting and it is best simply to remove yourself from the situation or let store employees handle it (who can call the police).

Next time go to McDonald’s, where the coffee is better and cheaper, there’s free WiFi, and the people next to you are kindly old retirees.

You haven’t done misanthropy until you’ve ushered at my synagogue during High Holy Days or B’nai Mitzvot. I was not fit for civilized converse for hours afterward. I switched to ushering the childrens’ services, because they were on time, more polite, and less demanding.

[NFR: Ah, you remind me of the Pascha services at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas. For Orthodox, the services begin around 11pm or so, with a prayer vigil in the darkened cathedral, followed by a procession around the outside of the church three times, then a ritualized re-entering of the church to celebrate the Resurrection. Every Easter, the place fills up with area Russian immigrants who likely haven’t been to church any other time of the year. Fine — Easter and Christmas Christians are common in all traditions. Only a hard-hearted believer would hold that against these Russians. But here’s the thing. It really is standing room only, with everyone packed in like rush-hour subway commuters. Many of those Russians come dressed to go out (it’s on Saturday night) — women in super-short skirts, for example — because as soon as the procession is over (about 45 minutes into the entire liturgy), they’re hitting the nightclubs. OK, fine, that’s on you. What’s everybody’s problem is that some of them will stand in the nave of the church, **during the Paschal liturgy**, and gab on their cellphones. I kid you not. I’ve seen this more than once. — RD]

Cell phone etiquette or the lack of drives me crazy. Let me share two examples, one that worked for me and one that did not.

The husband of one of my colleagues was diagnosed with cancer. When this occurred she started carrying her cell phone to meetings. She would tell us that she needed to leave her phone on vibrate in case a doctor or her husband called. If the phone did vibrate she quietly stepped outside the meeting. This worked for me.

Another time I was meeting with a colleague and her cell phone rang. Without saying anything to me she just answered the phone and turned her chair so that I was looking at her back. From listening I ascertained that her high school daughter had scored poorly on a test and needed to process this with her mom. This did not work for me. After a few minute, I walked out of her office.

You did the right thing, Rod. It is not difficult to walk outside to make or take a phone call. It is the polite and courteous thing to do. Hopefully your “outburst” jolted this joker into an understanding that there are other people around him in the world. The conversation about your son is just surreal…

Re: . Many of those Russians come dressed to go out (it’s on Saturday night)

Most years I go up to Michigan to do Pascha at St Clements in Dearborn– my first Orthodox church. And just as you describe at St Sava’s, it seems that the entire Bulgarian and Macedonian population of the area shows up for the procession, and then most of them melt away before the Liturgy. Two years ago there was a guy somewhat casually dressed with a holstered firearm at his side. I hope he was a cop on duty, or about to be. It was really creepy to see in church.

@siarlys jenkins “Who is the hero in that video? I mean, one could make out a case that the man on the cell phone thinks the whole world should be silent while he finishes a private cell phone conversation in a very public place. Sort of clashes with your narrative.”

A reasonable question. It’s still a good thing for street performers and other annoying pests to be a little uncertain about their audiences though. Most of the public will endure their antics with a silent seethe, but every once in a while, you get a Croatian mob gunsel like that guy who simply doesn’t give a damn.

And you’re sure this had nothing subconsciously and psychologically to do with your recent outrages over gay rights… ?

[NFR: Nope. I don’t care that the guy was gay, or said he was. I wouldn’t have known had he hadn’t told me, and by then he had already annoyed me by not shutting up when it was clear I didn’t want to talk to him. I wouldn’t have mentioned it here except that his TMI admission was part of an endless stream of stupid, unwelcome chatter. What I care about was that he was a narcissistic jerk. Surely you believe that it is possible for gay men to be narcissistic jerks, right? Surely you don’t believe their homosexuality entitles them to behave rudely to all those around them without being called on it. Surely. — RD]

LOL. Of course I’ve never ever gotten mad like that, but it makes me feel better that you did. What gets me is that people seem to have no idea that they’re being rude. They don’t get the concept.

I was at a traffic light last week and a cop on a motorcycle pulled up next to me and I could hear the music from his radio. (Since when do cops listen to music on the radio while on duty anyhow?) I rolled down my window and asked, “So cops blast music now?” (I do regret my confrontational way of putting that). “I’m not blasting it,” he replied. To which I would have replied, had the light not then turned green, “If I can hear it in my space, you are.”

Out of Esoterica comes an interesting intersection of topics! About the origins of clowns…

There is much debate. Some of us hold that the competing theories are mutually inclusive rather than exclusive. This is one such.

A rebellious sect of early Christianity — some assert it was the Albingensians — felt called to minister to the illiterate masses where they live. To avoid arrest (and worse) by ecclesial authorities, they posed as jongleurs, their props doubled as storytelling aids (pictures, thousand words, etc.) and their costumes both hid their identities and gave them license to use stagecraft during their ministry.

I speculate that fear of clowns originated in part from harsh propaganda from Church authorities in their ongoing efforts to stamp out the jongleurs’ heresy.

😀

Oh, and in the fiction-as-source-of-truth department: I strongly recommend the “Circus World” series of stories by Barry Longyear. The collections are The City of Baraboo, Circus World and Elephant Song. Longyear also wrote the novel basis and screenplay for the movie Enemy Mine.

I loved David Rakoff too. Embarrassing to admit that I can’t think about him now without crying.

People who talk on cellphones in public, especially in places like coffee shops, are extremeley rude, and I hope it becomes less and less socially acceptable to do it. But what infuriates me is seeing people texting and checking devices while they are driving. This is especially obvious at stoplights. I’m horrified at how casually people endanger themselves and everyone else on the road.

As someone who travels frequently for my job, I dread the day they allow cell phone calls on flights. It’s bad enough listening to everyone before the doors close. (“We’re on the plane now.” or “We need to follow up with this customer tomorrow. I’ll get you the details when I land. or Other Variations of Unnecessary Blather that No One Cares About But YOU.)

My other pet peeve is people who parent loudly in public for an audience (and many of them look at you to see if you’re listening). “No, Joey, you can’t bump the nice lady.” You are training your kid to think he’s on stage. What happened to teaching kids they’re not the center of the universe??

But don’t the libertarians (and Heinlein) say that “an armed society is a polite society”…?

My grumpiness usually limits itself to muttering “get a job!” to aggressive street beggars. I swear, after running the daily gamut between my train station and work, I start to think fondly about Victorian workhouses and forced labor. And I do NOT agree with the present legal interpretation of begging as being an activity allowed under the First Amendment.

While cell phone conversations are annoying to me, even more annoying is people who think that Starbucks is a place to hang out all afternoon and do homework, or business, or take on-line classes. Starbucks is a business that sells coffee. When you are done with your coffee get out. Other people want to sit and drink their coffee. There are libraries in most every town. Go there. Or if you are taking on line course work at home, or working from home, perhaps you should think of the “home” part and stay there. Ask any Starbucks barrista and they will tell you that the people that hog a table and set up shop for several hours are far worse than the cell phone abusers.

You did the right thing. Confronting bad and barbaric behavior is the only thing that can turn the tide against the horde of morons that threaten to overwhelm our public places.

I don’t go looking for trouble, but I’m much quicker now to come down on people when they are way out of line. If someone is around me, you aren’t going to blow smoke in my face, or take cuts in a queue, or talk during a concert, and so on. It just ain’t going to happen. If it does, I’ll get an usher or deal with it myself.

A few months ago my wife and I were at an acoustic concert with Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt. Great concert except for the guy right in front of me who wouldn’t quit talking to his girlfriend. So my wife asked him to quiet down a couple of times. He ignored her. I then asked him to quiet down, a bit more forcefully I’ll admit. He responded by threatening to kill me. No kidding. My to my wife’s chagrin, I said, “let’s take it outside.” He didn’t move, thank goodness. He did, however, quit talking.

What amazed us both after the concert and after the barbarian and his arm candy left was all the people around us who chimed in and said that what we’d done was the right thing, and that they’d heard what he said to me, and if I wanted to report it they’d vouch for my behavior, blah, blah, blah. The thing is, no one said or did “boo” during the heat of the moment. It was startling, actually, how cowed everyone was.

I am not so sure. Lots of “rising” cultures are dismissive of previously accepted norms. Go to a place like China. It makes New York CIty look like a model of decorum and order. And it seems that a lot of cultures on the outs get all caught up in the ossified rules that seem to exist only for their own survival.

If business culture counts as a culture, look at the rough and tumble world of tech, especially in the 90s and early 00s. No etiquette. No respect for previously ascendent norms. Pshaw. That’s for banking and journalism.

Franklin, thanks for the interesting leads. I’ll look into those leads, but only while the sun shines. I’m too coulrophobic to read about clowns at night.

Mike W, I’ve noticed the same thing about people avoiding confrontation. When I’ve been in places with TV (we don’t have TV at home) I’ve seen some reality shows that are a sorta ethical-dilemma-cum-Candid-Camera. They’ll set up a situation where unknowing bystanders witness some kind of dishonest or abusive behavior and they see if people will “blow the whistle”.

Humans turn into docile sheep in dangerous situations. I read an article some years back that explored this phenomenon, trying to find out why passengers would elect to stay put in a grounded airplane on fire. They found the people who did get up to leave and survived had one thing in common: they had all been in life-threatening disaster situations before. That prior experience freed them from the ovine trance the other passengers were in before and until they succumbed to inhalation deaths.

My father is a former JAG, and as a lawyer deals with intransigent sorts on a daily basis. (Not to mention he survived raising my brothers and me; we’d be a trial for a saint) He’s good at these casual everyday sorts of confrontations.
Most people aren’t, anymore. My dad’s legal profession gives him authority in our litigious society, where what’s moral and what’s legal so often diverge.

Not to mention the usual complaint about our society lacking moral standards. It’s hard to challenge someone on bad behavior if you don’t know if the other bystanders are your allies, or theirs–that’s always a crapshoot in a society the celebrates breaking the rules.

And while I know there are some nice cops out there, many have succumbed to the recent societal changes with an Us vs. Them mentality and they can’t always help mediate conflicts.

So basically, we’re all huddled, knowing a conflict could spiral out of control, and that our attempts to intervene could end with serious long-term consequences for us. So some really rude people get away with more than they would have perhaps in a society with a more cohesive standard.

If we had a cultural template for confronting people politely, that might help. Most confrontations we rank-and-file citizens witness are fictional and end badly.

Surely you believe that it is possible for gay men to be narcissistic jerks, right? Surely you don’t believe their homosexuality entitles them to behave rudely to all those around them without being called on it. Surely. — RD

Just checking. That’s why I said subconscious… it’s hard to tell even one’s own mind sometimes.

Looking at the comments here and in the “which church will be the best for the coming Gay Apocalypse” thread, I can’t help but notice how many commenters love to engage in dramatic overgeneralization about “hedonism” and “barbarism” and “rudeness” as if their little myopic view of the here-and-now combined with a dash of social conservatism somehow renders their curmudgeonly judgement of the contemporary world anything other than old-fartism.

On an unrelated note, except to show an extraordinary example of solidarity rather than misanthropy, here’s a good write-up on the extraordinary customer boycott of a locally beloved supermarket chain, Market Basket:

But there are a fair number of people in the South who seem to insist on having everyone around them know their business. … On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I ran into such an obnoxious person at my local Starbucks in Chicago.

People of African descent seem more prone to it up north… but we must remember that their culture is at root, southern. Not to promote stereotypes, I once told a man talking loudly to his mother on a cell phone in a library that we didn’t all need to know about his business and his mother’s. Some other guy reacted “It ain’t none of your business,” but the man who was talking on the phone quieted down, and later came over to apologize. I also remember a man who came up to a friend (all of this happened at the library’s public computers) and started talking, but the friend thus addressed said “You’re loud.” I later thanked the man for reminding his friend to quiet down. They were both from the local Gospel Mission, run by blue-nosed Republicans who live in Waukesha but feel they have a mission to serve people in the inner city they never actually care to encounter. I’d have more respect for the missionaries if they lived in their own shelter and made it a real mission in their lives.

Another place some people don’t know when to be quiet in is art museums. I’ve been in galleries that were empty except for the guards, who were carrying on a conversation. Or empty except for a couple of young women sitting on a bench catching up on each others’ news. The one time some jerk decided to make a phone call, though, I did get the guard to stop him.

Seriously? I agree that the dude’s behavior sounds a bit annoying, but if some strange man came yelling at me and waving his finger in my face because he didn’t like the fact that I was talking to my friends on my phone, I would call the cops straight away and have you charged with harassment at the very least. You were way out of line here, and extremely uncivilized. Far more so than the young man with whom you were annoyed.

Science has got your back, Rod Dreher
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he pervasive use of cell phones impacts many people–both cell phone users and bystanders exposed to conversations. This study examined the effects of overhearing a one-sided (cell phone) conversation versus a two-sided conversation on attention and memory. In our realistic design, participants were led to believe they were participating in a study examining the relationship between anagrams and reading comprehension. While the participant was completing an anagram task, the researcher left the room and participants overheard a scripted conversation, either two confederates talking with each other or one confederate talking on a cell phone. Upon the researcher’s return, the participant took a recognition memory task with words from the conversation, and completed a questionnaire measuring the distracting nature of the conversation. Participants who overheard the one-sided conversation rated the conversation as significantly higher in distractibility than those who overheard the two-sided conversation. Also, participants in the one-sided condition scored higher on the recognition task. In particular they were more confident and accurate in their responses to words from the conversation than participants in the two-sided condition. However, participants’ scores on the anagram task were not significantly different between conditions. As in real world situations, individual participants could pay varying amounts of attention to the conversation since they were not explicitly instructed to ignore it. Even though the conversation was irrelevant to the anagram task and contained less words and noise [fewer words and less noise — ed], one-sided conversations still impacted participants’ self-reported distractibility and memory, thus showing people are more attentive to cell phone conversations than two-sided conversations. Cell phone conversations may be a common source of distraction causing negative consequences in workplace environments and other public places.
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